Puget Sound Energy awarded Clean Energy grant

State grant advances electricity grid projects benefiting Washington communities

BELLEVUE, Wash. (9/21/2021) Puget Sound Energy was recently awarded a Washington State Department of Commerce grant from the state’s Clean Energy fund.

The grant worth $150,000 will help PSE with analysis and preliminary design to add a renewable hydrogen and/or renewable natural gas-powered generator to a planned solar plus storage microgrid at Tenino High School.

The microgrid at Tenino High school will help meet the community’s requirements to use the school as an emergency shelter in response to severe weather or during natural disasters.

The DOC announced approximately $3.9 million in grants from the state’s Clean Energy Fund for 18 electricity grid modernization projects across the state.

"PSE is bringing reliability and resiliency to the next level by extending outage support from “hours” to “days” with one extra clean energy element to be introduced to the system," said Kincheiu Wei, PSE Senior Engineer for Grid Modernization and Enablement. "This is a great opportunity for PSE to learn how to safely handle hydrogen and/or renewable natural gas at the utility-scale, and to explore the possibility of including them as part of the energy offering to our customers in the future," he said.

PSE received $2.7 million in 2020 from the commerce department’s Clean Energy Fund for a solar-plus-storage microgrid in Tenino, Washington. It will be the first system of its kind in PSE’s service territory and part of the company’s overall grid modernization efforts.

In January 2021, PSE set its aspirational “Beyond Net Zero Carbon” energy company goal. Through this initiative, PSE targets reduction of its own carbon emissions to net zero and goes beyond by helping other sectors to enable carbon reduction across the state of Washington.

For more information about the Tenino microgrid project, visit PSE’s project webpage. To learn more, visit the Grid Modernization webpage.

Media Contact:

Andrew Padula, 1-888-831-7250, psenewsroom@pse.com

Puget Sound Energy is proud to serve our neighbors and communities in 10 Washington counties.
We're the state’s largest utility, supporting more than 1.1 million electric customers and nearly 900,000 natural gas customers.
We aspire to be a beyond net zero carbon energy company by 2045.
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